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Microsoft Now Collects Royalties From Over Half of All Android Devices
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has inked a deal with Compal Electronics, which pumps out gadgets that run Android and Chrome OS, for an undisclosed sum."
Microsoft has an explanatory weblog post; with this deal over half of all Android devices are licensing patents from Microsoft. Notably refusing to cooperate and instead opting for the court battle route are Motorola and Barnes and Noble.
MS may be making money off other peoples' work, but look at what this picture is telling us. Manufacturers would rather pay MS to not use their windows OSes. That's pretty damning!
Smaller companies may well end up paying more even if they win.
Corporate lawyers are pretty good at estimating the success of this sort of thing. Microsoft will probably offer to settle at some point, but have to carry this through a certain way because a threat of a lawsuit is worthless if you aren't seen to be willing to carry it out.
Notice how concepts such as justice and who's actually in the right don't come into this...
Google can't do anything about the FAT patent that everyone has to use for card storage. Consumers expect to be able to pull the SD card from a device and have it usable in something else without having to worry about file system drivers. FAT is the defacto standard for memory cards today.
The industry fell asleep on this one, when they should have all worked together to create a license and royalty free open spec file system. The blew it and are now paying the price, well, we the consumer is paying the price.
What are you talking about? Windows 7 is by far the best OS Microsoft has put out and, in my opinion, far easier to use than any other desktop OS (I feel like Apple's OS has stagnated and KDE and GNOME are just poor man's copycats). The swtich from XP to 7 is an easy choice for any company since it is more secure, more stable, and more user-friendly.
I will not use my mod points just because I disagree with you. But here's my response:
Windows 7 has been nothing like usable. Usability seriously dropped compared to XP. I mean there are so many small quirks that are damn annoying and not intuitive. I still am baffled by the overwrite dialogue every time it appears. It's the worst usability offender by far, because it uses two UX elements at the same time. Even if Gnome and KDE are "poor man's copycats"(which they no longer are), they are much more consistent. In short, I am able to operate KDE/Gnome while I'm drunk and can't understand how to do most tasks in Win7.
I guess if the cellphone manufacturers aren't willing to run Microsoft's mobile OS on their devices, Microsoft will just have to start acting like all the other patent trolls that don't make viable products either.